Cold Shower 26: Coaching, Counseling & The Culture of Contribution

Cold Shower Coaching, Counseling & Culture of Contribution
Volume I, Article XXVI

Dr. Fisher, I am a die hard NBA, NFL, NHL fan. My dream is that my area one day has an NBA franchise. We have won the Super Bowl in the NFL and the Stanley Cup in the NHL. Now, all we have to do is win an NBA title, but first we need a team. I am very much into the winning ways of these teams. Can these winning ways be transferred into the workplace?

The business of business is always the same only the semantics change a bit. The commodity in sport is the athlete. It is the engine that drives the team. High rollers acquire these teams with little investment other than in the players. Communities bend over backwards to support their franchises by building $ half billion stadiums, and then they clean up on ticket prices, concession returns, and parking. These teams are seeded further by television contracts so that even the poorest teams in the respective leagues with the smallest television audiences get wealthy. But herein lies a caveat; fans come to identify their own sense of worth by the winning or losing of their teams. So, as Vince Lombardi once put it, “Winning isn’t everything. Winning is the only thing.” I mention this because there is much to learn from sport with regard to your question, but there is much that could be misconstrued as well.

Several years ago, I worked for a company that started out quite modestly in the 1920s in Chicago. It started with a handshake between two friends, one a chemist and the other a salesman. These two men decided that service would be their focus, and the customer’s best interest at heart would be their objective.

They didn’t have any fancy formulas to follow, no Management by Objectives, no sophisticated screening system for new employees. They had a philosophy and a spiritual commitment to customer service. Today, the company is a multinational and $billion enterprise with thousands of employees.

What I remember best from that experience is that I had expert coaching which wasn’t called coaching, personal counseling that wasn’t called counseling, and management that assess my capabilities and tailored my training to that assessment.

My boss took the raw material, me, and adapted the company’s philosophy consistent with my inherent abilities. I should mention that I made a rocky start being disinclined to take orders from anyone, and displaying an aversion for sharing with others what was on my mind. Instead of taking umbrage at my disposition by threatening to fire me, my boss got me to open up.

He did this by studying me as I went through my typical angst at his instruction, and then waited in silence for me to put language to my nonverbal expression. Have you ever experienced someone looking at you for a full minute and saying nothing? If you haven’t, try it on someone. Chances are they will have a near panic attack to fill the void was something. Believe me, it is excruciatingly agonizing. Before I knew it, I was actually confessing my insecurities. He listened during this whole soliloquy without comment. When I was nearly drained of emotions, he said, “We’ll talk tomorrow.” That is all, nothing more.

Tomorrow came, and he said, “We’re putting you out on your own. You know technology. You don’t know our products or services, but perhaps you’ll learn best calling on customers. If this doesn’t work out, perhaps you would prefer some other kind of work.”

This simple declaration stirred me as if I had been hit with a two-by-four. I was in a new city with a wife and two small children, only months away from the security of the chemical laboratory. Nobody bothered me doing experiments. What I didn’t know is that the company had a leisurely three-year technical sales training program that was designed to sell its technology customers with its expertise and not sales persuasion.

Having been trained as a technologist, it would seem to follow that I would fall easily into such a training program. My boss, however, was perceptive and could see that this would not work. Did he know that I had intuitive skills at selling that I had no idea I possessed? I don’t think so. I think his own intuition told him that this guy was not going to respond to convention or ritualistic rites of passage. So, I was given a small number of accounts of secondary importance and told to service and upgrade them.

This willingness to take a chance on me, to abandon the company’s prescribed formula, and to treat me as an individual proved providential. Within three months, I was leading the district in sales of a seven-man veteran sales force. Over the next four years, I brought in more than 80 percent of all the new business. From this inauspicious beginning, I would be promoted field management in my fourth year, then to corporate management in my sixth year, and then on to becoming an agent in the company’s growing international business.

One professional coach comes to mind that has dealt with intense players with diverse capability and sensitive egos. That coach is Bill Jackson of the Chicago Bulls and later of the Los Angeles Lakers. Scotty Pippen for the Bulls became the premier player when Michael Jordan retired, only to lose that role when Jordan returned two years later. Coach Jackson dealt with this potential conflict by using a mixture of Zen Buddhism and American Indian philosophy to embrace the bliss of these two great athletes on the Bulls. He adapted to their strengths by listening to what they thought, felt, and needed to be productive. When he brought the volatile Dennis Rodman of consummate eccentricity on board, he used the same approach. Even at this, if he hadn’t been able to accommodate other team members, his efforts would have been for naught. He repeated the same process when he had championship teams with the Los Angeles Lakers, dealing with the constant conflicts that existed between his two stars Shaquile O’Neil and Kobe Bryant.

Coach Jackson espoused a simple, direct, and all-embracing philosophy: everyone on the team was important, but no one wins unless the team succeeds. In his system, all players had a right to express their concerns, and he would listen, as the spirit of the team was not compromised because there existed conflict.

Conflict was actually the glue that held the team to its purpose. Players played well together not because they especially liked each other but because they had pride in achieving the same goal, winning. Each player knew what the other players could and couldn’t do, and adapted to their strengths and compensated for their weaknesses. They did so because they knew they needed each other to win.

Coach Red Auerback of the Boston Celtics created a “Celtic family,” which was driven by “Celtic pride.” This was not the same formula as that of coach Jackson, but the reward system was the similar in that it was based on the performance of the team, not individual performance. Coach Auerback put it this way:

You can’t measure a ballplayer’s heart, his ability to perform in the clutch, his willingness to sacrifice his offense or to play strong defense.

Coaching is both an individual and group project. For the individual, coach is assessing what a person can and will do, and then designing an assignment to maximize the utilization of his talent, and therefore the contribution to the team. On a group basis, coaching involves the development of a system in which individual talent blends together synergistically to create more impact than the sum of the people involved.

Notice there is no mention of motivation. Motivation is not something that a coach can implant in an individual. Nor are incentives necessarily motivational in the promotion of team effort. All the money in the world, even the meeting of all the stated needs of the individual will not produce the desired results. What produces success and winning is a Culture of Contribution. This culture is driven by a philosophy, which makes sense to the individual, and with which the team as a group can buy into with all their passion.

Coaching, then, is assessing and adapting to players or persons as individuals. Counseling relates to listening to individuals, not only what they say, but how they display their personalities verbally and nonverbally. Emerson once said: What you say speaks so loudly I cannot hear you! A counselor hears, records, understands and uses this information to help individuals find themselves, and therefore work more productively with others.

It should be apparent from this that counseling has nothing to do with giving advice. Nor does counseling involve criticizing, condemning, comparing or controlling individuals. Some individuals are rich in denial and have little sense of themselves, or how they get in the way of their own lives. A counselor helps make such discrepancies apparent to individuals. A caveat: A counselor never owns the problem of the counseled. Nor does the counselor attempt to save individuals form themselves. Only they have the will and the way of doing that.

What we can learn from sport, and what may be transferable to business are the exacting standards by which athletes are measured. Performance appraisal is often a game or a charade in business, but never in sport. The best evidence is that a player and the coach have the same information on the player’s performance, and similar standards by which to judge its value. It would be well that such standards existed as well in business or other workplaces.

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Copyright (1996) See Dr. Fisher’s Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (1998).